What does
@jberryhill think of this?
I've been fairly busy lately.
The circumstances around this, as I understand them, are a little more complicated than are generally appreciated. On the question of "How does a French court get jurisdiction over a US registrant?" the answer is pretty simple - "If the US registrant agrees to it." What happened here initially is that a private company in France, which also claimed certain rights, sued the US registrant in France.
When you are in the US and you are sued in a foreign country, and that foreign country is in the relevant treaty system for international enforcement of judgments, you initially have two choices. One is that you can let the foreign proceeding go, not appear in that proceeding, and then challenge US enforcement of the judgment if, for example, the exercise of jurisdiction over you in that foreign proceeding would not satisfy US standards. The other choice would be to go ahead and show up in that foreign proceeding and participate in the case there.
The thing is, if you take that second route, then when US enforcement of that judgment against you is sought, you can't argue that the foreign court didn't have jurisdiction over you. By showing up in the foreign proceeding on the substance of the case, you admitted to the jurisdiction of that court.
So that first decision needs to be made on the basis of whether you believe it would be more efficient to mount a collateral challenge against a default judgment in the US, whether your activities underlying the suit would satisfy a US court's standard of whether the foreign jurisdiction was appropriate, and a few other things.
So, where are we? Oh, okay... the private company in France filed a lawsuit in France against the US registrant in relation to the domain name. The US registrant decided to go ahead and participate in that lawsuit. But, the unexpected twist was that the French government later joined the lawsuit as a party and essentially argued "neither of those two parties are entitled to the domain name, we are." In France, as in many European countries, the relevant laws on geographic names are unlike those in the US. So, on the substance of the claim by the French government, the court decided in the government's favor.
Coming back to the question of "How did a French court get jurisdiction over this?" the simple answer is that the registrant subjected himself to the jurisdiction of the court. That's the simple answer. The more complicated answer is... more complicated.
HOWEVER, none of that has anything to do with the propriety of Web.com's decision to act on notice of a French court decision directing transfer of the domain name. I am not directly familiar with the specific form of the order, but while the court could have directed, say, the registrant to transfer the domain name (or risk whatever penalties or further expenses that may accrue from not doing so, or mounting a collateral challenge), that would be up to the registrant to comply, not comply, or challenge. Web.com was not before the court, and it is not my understanding that Web.com was ordered to transfer the domain name by the court. The domain name registration contract, by its own terms, states that it is a contract with a situs in Florida. Whether the French court had jurisdiction over the domain name itself (as opposed to the registrant) is an entirely different kettle of fish.